FSA is heading towards a one topic forum, so I figured I'd bring up a topic that used to be an area of great debate. Anybody else remember those debates years ago about trash, and landfill space, etc.? Seemed pretty loony to me, and has now all but disappeared from the public dialogue. So where'd it go? Certainly people haven't changed their minds about the proverbial trash sky falling, huh?
sky-falling obsessions are like any other stylish meme. after a while people find another one that nobody knows much about and it is a little more scary. then people realize they were getting tricked by a a gang of self-righteous scoundrels. the scoundrels move on to the next thing and the cycle continues. in all cases, i can produce a quote by HL mencken that drive the point home with precision: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." H. L. Mencken
I'm just now starting to use my recycle bin. I'm going to do my part to save the world!:grin: Seriously, the next big global crisis will be a shortage of potable water. If we think the oil crisis is bad, just wait till we start fighting over fresh water. Countries with large populations like China, India and Africa already have this problem. I can see it now. Liberals will be accusing a republican President of invading Iceland for its water! And the capitalist in me has me searching for companies to invest in to make a financial killing.:wink:
It seems like just a few short years ago that we were being warned that we were on the brink of running out of aluminum, glass, and newspaper. Hell, I had to drink milk out of plastic sacks in school because of these loony tunes! I really miss those milk pouches.
I don't think they were worried about running out of those materials as much as they were worried about running out of landfill space. Recycling materials makes sense. I'm just a little late to the party. We have entirely too many alarmists in the world. They completely underestimate our ability to adapt and come up with solutions to these problems. Technological advances in landfill operations are helping waste decompose faster. Man is a lot smarter than some people think...
Space for landfills is the big problem, closely followed by hazardous fluids seeping into drinking water aquifers from the many old and inadequate landfills. The new single-stream recycling is painless and greatly reduces the amount of garbage we have to find landfills for. The big remaining problem is disposing of hazardous waste. In BR there is ONE DAY A YEAR when you can bring old paint, solvents, waste oil, batteries and such across town to be recycled. I have a pile of cans cleared out of my garage sitting under a tarp waiting to be recycled. Meanwhile lots of folks just put it into the garbage where it goes to the landfill and ends up in our drinking water. I have a neighbor who changes his oil in both his vehicles and he just goes over and dumps it in the storm drain where it ends up in Wards Creek and eventually Lake Maurepas. They really need a once-a-month pickup for hazardous waste to make it easy for everyone to comply.
All this talk about water and we now are making cars that will run off of water. Doesn't make any sense to me?
Looks to me like entire areas of NOLA have ended up as perfect landfill spots (and before you candyarses get all worked up, I would have said this pre-Katrina too...only now more of you will agree with me.) That should satiate the region for at least a decade.
